Class War and the consciousness of change
Note: I had server problems yesterday, this is your weekend read.
Change, change, change — that’s all we hear about. It’s become a sound byte. And so far, it doesn’t appear to mean anything much.
We’re in a class war in this country, it’s been slowly growing since St. Ronnie the Reagan gave us the beatific picture of Amurika, complete with Hollywood lights and makeup and the mythology of trickle down economics. We also seldom speak of it, certainly no top tier candidates have used the words — it’s something of anathema to politicos, who don’t want to arouse the sleeping giant.
The populist candidates pointing out years of Bush’s robber baron approach have finally caught our attention. Both Barack and Hillary are talking like populists now but voting like moderates — they’re both campaigning on “middle class” issues but we have a problem with the definition; apparently we’re confused about what the “middle class” actually is — common wisdom has it to be anyone making between $40,000 and $200,000 per.
That’s a pretty big spread … and I can guarantee you the concerns of the lower middle class have very little in common with those of the upper. Those at the lower edge of this description are being picked off quickly resulting in the “shrinking” phenom, and with everything from groceries to gas to the declining dollar cutting into that block of buying power, common wisdom will have to change to accommodate that … but not for awhile; we move slowly to recognize truth and it will take time to threaten the upper tier. Remember — if it isn’t personally painful, the non-reflective don’t notice it.
It’s easier to understand this way — the “middle class” is defined by the amount of people who do not depend entirely on paychecks, but are subsidized by investments. Those who live from paycheck to paycheck might better be called “working class,” and that would be most of us; our main “investment” may be the home we’ve purchased, and with the bubble flattened and threatening to wink out, hanging on to that may be the totality of our retirement plans.
Notice that the poor don’t figure into any conversations we have in this nation — that’s also a gift from Reagan and his “welfare queen” theories that grew hostility toward the “have not’s” until twenty years later a Democrat, Bill Clinton, revamped welfare in a fashion that made the “tough love” Pubs happy and dismayed the real progressives. We’ve suffered a long downward spiral in social consciousness since Johnson’s war on poverty — the poor are invisible and we like it that way. If you need a litmus test on that, look at New Orleans … a national shame, with few voices crying in that sad, destroyed wilderness.
Charlie Rose recently interviewed Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Family of Organizations, a banking effort that provides micro-credit to individuals in Bangladesh. He is singlehandedly lifting that country out of poverty, and he says they’re on their way to achieving the Millennium objectives of cutting poverty in half by 2015. He says it can work anywhere — and it must. You can read about him here, and if his extraordinary method inspires you, here’s a link to Kiva where you can have the privilege of participating in a similar project of small lending, yourself.
There is a moral failing in this country that we ponder and discuss but seldom address outright — we’ve failed the “compassion” test. To those to whom much is given, much is expected … we may get the reflection of all we should have done and didn’t the hard way, in these next years. The mess the nation’s in is the one WE made … and WE have to fix it.
The new paradigm, the Aquarian revolution, has changed our use of language — it talks about WE and it MEANS WE … the “greed is good” concepts, the having-getting-keeping-for-myself model must mature because it pits neighbor against neighbor, tribe against tribe; in coming years, we will all survive here or none of us will. Our common good is both what’s at stake and what we will learn about — and there are few voices out there, as yet, giving us the reality of our situation.
Here are three reads — thanks to Green Dog for the last piece, from 2004.
Remember, consciousness starts in you — when enough you’s “get it,” the whole conversation shifts. What we attend to now will head off any “worst case scenarios” ahead; as the psychic community says, the best prediction is the one that does not come to pass because we meet the possibilities head on. Pass this one around.
Jude
Recession — Who cares?
Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation (web only)
January 9, 2008
THE SOOTHSAYERS have slaughtered the ox and are examining the gloppy entrails for signs: rising unemployment, a falling dollar, weak consumer spending, the credit crisis, a swooning stock market. Could there be something wrong here? Could we actually be approaching a, God forbid, recession?
To which the only sane response is: Who cares? According to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical — or at least the newspapers’ standard — definition of a recession, which specifies that there must be at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the GDP. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. If hard times have already fallen on a majority of Americans, then “recession” doesn’t seem to be a very useful term any more.
Odd Fixation
The economists’ odd fixation on growth as a measure of economic well-being puts them in a parallel universe of their own.
WorldMoneyWatch’s website tells us that, for example, that “The GDP growth rate is the most important indicator of economic health. If GDP is growing, so will business, jobs and personal income.” And the latest issue of US News and World Report advises, “The key . . . for America is to keep its economy growing as fast as possible without triggering inflation.”
But hellooo, we’ve had brisk growth for the last few years, as George W. Bush always likes to remind us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the middle class. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been “de-coupled” from mass prosperity.
Growth is not the only economic indicator that has let us down recently. In the last five years, America’s briskly rising productivity has been the envy of much of the world. But at the same time, real wages have actually declined. It’s not supposed to be this way, of course.
Economists have long believed that some sort of occult process would intervene and adjust wages upward as people worked harder and more efficiently.
Unemployment Rate
And what about the unemployment rate? The old liberal faith was that “full employment” would create a workers’ paradise, with higher wages and enhanced bargaining power for the little guy and gal. But we’ve had nearly full employment, or at least an unemployment rate of under 5 percent, for years now, again, without the predicted gains. What the old liberals weren’t counting on was a depressed minimum wage, impotent unions, and a witch’s brew of management strategies to hold wages and salaries down.
Now if those great and solemn economic indicators — growth, productivity and employment rates — have become de-coupled from most people’s lived experience, then there’s something wrong with the economists, the economy, or both. The clue lies in the word “most.” We have become so unequal as a nation that we increasingly occupy two different economies — one for the rich and one for everyone else — and the latter has been in a recession, if not a depression, for a long, long time. Not all economists can bring themselves to admit this.
Fiendish Schemes
I suspect that America’s fabulous growth in productivity is another illustration of the disconnect between economic measures and human experience. It’s been attributed to better education and technological advances, which would be nice to believe in. But a revealing 2001 study by McKinsey & Co. also credited America’s productivity growth to “managerial innovations” and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that we are also looking at fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads, and cutting back on breaks. Productivity may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom it can feel a lot like pain.
When employees are squeezed hard enough, then you have the possibility of a genuine recession as technically defined. People buy less, so growth declines, to the point where even the economic over-class has to sit up and take notice. This is happening in Japan, where a recent Wall Street Journal headline announces: “Growing Reliance on Temps Holds Back Japan’s Rebound: Firms Increasingly Add Part-Time Workers; Spending Power Lags.” The U.S., where consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy compared to a little more than half in Japan, is even more vulnerable to a downturn in personal consumption.
Cult of Growth
What is this fixation on growth anyway? As a general rule of biological survival, any creature or entity that depends on perpetual growth is well worth avoiding, lest you be eaten alive. As Bill McKibben argues in his book Deep Economy, the “cult of growth” has led to global warming, ghastly levels of pollution, and diminishing resources. Tumors grow, at least until they kill their hosts; economies ought to be sustainable.
Apocalypse aside, the mantra of growth has deceived us for far too long. What it translates into is this: Don’t worry about the relative size of your slice, just concentrate on growing the pie! Now, with a recession threatening even more suffering for those who are already struggling, may be the perfect time to get out the pie-cutter again. Too bad that the one leading Democratic candidate who promises to do so now appears to be on the ropes.
Copyright Ā© 2008 The Nation
Levite Be Gone: Releasing the Samaritan Within
Jason Miller, BestOfCyrano,ThomasPaine
1/9/08
- [30] In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. [31] A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. [32] So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. [33] But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. [34] He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. [35] The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
[36] “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
[37] The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
āLuke 10:25-37
In contrast to the seriousness of Christ’s message, consider a related irony that is comically absurd. Commonly referred to as the “U.S.” our nation consists of grossly deformed social, political, economic, and cultural systems that indoctrinate us in the quasi-religion of “it’s all about me” while conditioning us to reflexively reject nearly all things related to the collective “US.”
Self-satisfied and narcissistic little careerists that many of us are, we remain oblivious to the immense suffering we are inflicting on the world as we gleefully pursue the American Dream, replete with the requisite Hummer, McMansion, trophy spouse, 2.5 “perfect” children, and all the trappings to which our American Exceptionalism entitles us at the expense of billions of other humans, hundreds of billions of non-human animals, and Mother Earth herself.
Sure, many of us hear Jesus’s parable and think of ourselves as the Good Samaritans. After all, our humanitarian imperialism has made the world safe for freemarket-dom and corporatocracy for years. And those “ignorant savages” whom we have “rescued” by bringing them the “stability” of ruthless dictatorships and showing them how to put their resources we exploit to good use damn well better be thankful we bestowed our “compassion” upon them. So in a very perverse sense, we are Samaritans when it comes to our foreign policy because we often involve ourselves in the affairs of others, but no argument based on a shred of intellectual honesty would support us being “Good.”
Generally speaking, we have much more in common with the Levite than the Good Samaritan. From the moment the doctor retrieved us from the birth canal and severed the umbilical cord that nurtured us for nine months, our sponge-like minds began absorbing the idiocies of the distinctly “American” myth of rugged, hyper-individualism. We devote such exhaustive levels of emotional and mental energy to aping the ridiculous archetypes personified by the likes of “go it alone hard asses” such as John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis that our capacity to experience empathy, compassion, and deep connections with human and non-human animals is severely stunted.
How beguiled are we with a cultural dogma that elevates the individual to the level of a deity and portrays collectivism as a plague of Biblical proportions?
Let’s examine some of the contradictions and distortions to which many of us are blind.
Even the “lone wolf” legends of the silver screen can’t escape their humanity. They were conceived by two human beings, developed in their mother’s womb for nine months, brought into this world by doctors or mid-wives, raised and nurtured, educated, and remain(ed) highly interdependent with the rest of the human race.
Few people other than Ted Kaczynski can claim anything close to true independence, and even his wasn’t life-long or absolute. Yet many of us conduct our lives with a thinly veiled “me first and to hell with the rest of the world” attitude, as if we are the only ones on the face of the planet who really matter and as if we don’t need a soul to help us as we bull-doze through life to attain our goals.
As a nation we have seriously defaulted on the social contract to which we are each bound as long as we participate in society. Our moneyed elite, petite bourgeoisie, and wild-eyed libertarians insist that society provide them with Rock of Gibraltar assurance of their negative rights to attain profit and protect their infinitely precious propertyāand they want heads rolling if someone violates these “sacrosanct” privileges.
Meanwhile they struggle (often successfully) with nearly every ounce of their being to minimize, diminish, or obliterate the use of public, communal resources to uphold and fulfill positive rights, such as access to health care, education, food, and housing.
In the propagandistic jargon of the ruling class and libertarians, negative rights are “freedom” and positive rights are “welfare.” Associating their coveted “rights” to profit and private property with the word freedom, a universally beloved ideal, and positive rights with the word welfare, a pejorative term, is a clever way of keeping the masses working against their own interests.
For instance, what decent human being would argue that we don’t have a moral obligation to tend to our sick and dying? Even in the amoral chaos of war soldiers do their utmost to care for their wounded comrades. Yet as is common knowledge, Michael Moore recently made a documentary which clearly demonstrates how depraved and grossly inadequate our profit-driven health care system is. And there is still incredible resistance to universal health care. In the “me first society” we have no problem telling Christ to go to Hell with all that compassion nonsense.
Let’s follow the twisted logic here. John Calvin told us that the quickest way to ascend to heaven is to get rich. Universal health care is a form of socialism. And if we begin to surrender our beloved capitalism, ‘evil Commies’ will eliminate our freedom to think what television tells us to think, our “right” to buy more stuff, and our one in a billion chance to be like “The Donald.”
So, without yielding to the abject malevolence of collectivism, how do we deal with the problem of 46 million uninsured, the tens of millions more who are under-insured, the indigent whom the hospitals dump on Skid Row without treatment, and the millions of seniors who choose between having enough to eat and filling their prescriptions?
Quite simple really. We PRETEND to be the Good Samaritan while continuing along our private little “roads to success” like the Levites we are. We pass laws requiring that people carry health insurance (again we can thank John Calvināthis time for imbuing us with the tortured notion that punishment is a form of love for one’s fellow man since it cleanses our sinful nature). We produce scandalously deceptive commercials in which Montel Williams shills for a Big Pharma front called the PPA and leaves viewers with the impression that the major drug companies are going from community to community dispensing free prescription medication (when in reality the PPA merely provides information on public and private assistance available to the uninsured). We push for medical savings accounts. We shift the costs to those with insurance by raising premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. We shout down those who decry the obscene state of health care in the wealthiest nation in the world by telling them to quit whining about “entitlements” and to move to France if they hate America so much…
In the 18th Century Rousseau recognized that the ruling class was enforcing a grossly one-sided social contract which ensured that they maintained their wealth and power. Little has changed, even in the “land of the free.” How peculiar that we profess to be a nation of Christians yet tenaciously cling to a system that ensures extremely polarized socioeconomic strata, causes suffering for billions of sentient creatures and violates nearly every principle for which Christ was martyred.
Perhaps the most telling sign of our shattered moral compass is that many of the millions of US Americans who are finally recognizing that the United States is a brutish monster have stampeded to support a libertarian reactionary from Texas. While Ron Paul is principled and courageous in his stances against the establishment’s murderous foreign policy, he remains wedded to the libertarian ideals which rest on the deluded infantilism of hyper-individualism.
Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in homeless shelters. Libertarianism is simply a rather transparent guise for the myopic selfishness and naked greed that accompany our obsession with “me first and only.” To justify maintaining their negative rights under the social contract while minimizing or eliminating positive rights (which actually place a burden of responsibility upon all of usāand this very jejune bunch is apparently incapable of accepting such a load), they attack laws and regulations that “threaten” the “free” market and the use of public monies to provide for the well-being of society as a whole.
Some of the more rabid libertarian “thinkers” such as F.A. Hayek went so far as to remind the poor and working class to thank their oppressors and exploiters for their very existence.
“The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have ‘created’ was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it had degraded to a lower level; it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided.”
Or in other words, forget about a living wage, safe working conditions, or reasonable hours, you miserable ingrates. Without us, you would not have been born. Bend over and say thank you!
Once presented with the glaringly obvious moral and practical deficiencies of libertarianism, capitalism, and hyper-individualism (each of which we have been conditioned to embrace as “normal,” healthy, and inevitable), most decent human beings recoil in horror. Objectively, we want to be the Good Samaritan, but have been dogmatically trained to be the Levite.
While most of us aren’t evil by nature, the psychic disfigurement caused by our dedication to hyper-individualism manifests itself in some very ugly ways. However, we have the power to regurgitate the intellectual manure we have been digesting since birth and focus our time, energy, thoughts and actions to honoring the social contract as Rousseau prescribed:
“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”
It’s time to abandon the childish notion that it is “all about me.” The world is in flames, in large part because of us. We need to be Samaritans, not Levites.
Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/.
America’s disease is greed
Father Andrew Greeley, Chicago Sun-Times
August 20, 2004
THE MOST serious spiritual problem in the country today is reckless and untrammeled greed. Greed caused the disgraceful corporate scandals that fill our newspapers. Greed is responsible for crooked cops and crooked politicians. Greed causes the constant efforts to destroy unions that protect basic worker rights.
Greed has produced rash tax cuts that have given money to the rich and in effect taken it away from the poor. Greed has led to the immigration policy in which hundreds of poor men and women die every year as they struggle across the desert for the jobs that el norte promises them. Greed accounts for the efforts to take profitability out of the pensions and health insurance of working men and women. Greed is responsible for the fact that so many Americans have no health insurance and the fact that the recent reform of Medicare was a fraud. Greed causes newspapers to overestimate their circulation.
Obscene CEO Salaries
Greed is responsible for the obscene salaries of CEOs. In the ’90s the ratio of CEO compensation to average workers’ compensation was 250 to 1, meaning that the boss earned on his first day of work during a year as much as the worker did in a whole year. In European countries the ratio is closer to 100 to 1. Recent estimates put the current ratio at 500 to 1 — the boss makes as much before lunch as the worker does all year. Greed is the cause of the high wages paid to the bosses even if the company is failing.
Greed is responsible for the endless stress and ruthless competition of the workplace and the strains and tensions of professional-class marriages. Greed (in this instance another name for relentless ambition) explains much of the cheating on college campuses. Greed is responsible for outsourcing, which is incapable of comprehending that the employees who lose their jobs are also the consumers who sustain the economy.
Reckless Ventures
Greed generates the reckless ventures that in part caused the bubble of the late ’90s. Greed causes expensive wars that shatter the budget. Greed is the reason that only the wealthy are benefitting so far from the economic upturn that is allegedly happening. Greed drives loan sharks. Greed is responsible for the success of big box stores that tax the poor with low wages to provide bargains for affluent suburban shoppers.
Greed is the reason poor white Appalachians, poor African Americans and poor Native Americans must fight the wars that the wealthy start. Jessica Lynch joined the Army so she could go to college. Her Native American roommate, killed in action, joined so, single mother that she was, she could support her children. Greed is the reason why the country is being run by those whom the president has described, however inelegantly, as the ‘’haves and the have mores.'’
Reagan’s Teachings
No one said during the bizarre deification of Ronald Reagan that he taught us that greed is good and that we should feel good about our greedy country. Greed is the reason that the country is being run by the insurance, pharmaceutical, weapons and petroleum industries. Greed causes worldwide sex slavery of women and children.
Greed drives the murders of the narcotics world. Greed is responsible for the exploitations of teen sports stars by colleges and for the mess in the pro sports world. It is also the cause of the use of performance drugs by young athletes. Greed is responsible for the bad advice lawyers gave the Church years ago to beat victims of sexual abuse into the ground. It is behind the scam artists who steal from the elderly.
Greed may have been a more serious problem for Americans, say, in the era of the robber barons. But the Garys and the Morgans and the Carnegies were a small bunch of men. Now their greed has seeped down to a much larger segment of the population.
Four Sins
The Catholic Church speaks of four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. Two are cheating workers out of wages and exploiting widows and children. Both happen every day in our greedy country.
Ambition is not evil within limits. The struggle for success is not bad within limits. Hard work and fair rewards are good within limits. It is not good to take from the poor and give to the rich, and that’s exactly what this country is doing today.
Don’t let anyone tell you that lust is the most deadly of the deadly sins.
Father Andrew M. Greeley has built an international assemblage of devout fans over a career that spans five decades. He is the author of over 50 best-selling novels and more than 100 works of non-fiction and his writing has been translated into 12 languages. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and a research associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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